Throwing on Paint

Throwing on Paint

I’ve always enjoyed drawing pictures, but from an early age I worried that I didn’t have the talent to produce good art. Over the last couple of years, I have started taking painting lessons and gained important insights into the making of art.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned is that talent is overrated. It is possible for almost anyone to learn how to draw and paint. If we can see and draw a straight line, we can learn how to draw realistic pictures.

This shouldn’t have been a surprise to me as I’ve understood for a long time that writing is about hard work more than talent. There are skills we need to write. A good grasp of grammar is helpful and perhaps even more importantly writers need to develop a sense of curiosity about the world. I think most people can acquire these attributes.

In order to draw and paint, there are proficiencies that are required. Most importantly, a visual artist must see. That sounds simple, but many people go through life without thoughtfully observing at the world around them.

Once you can see and have ideas that you would like to express, there are technical skills that should be developed. In my art lessons, I’ve learned to see lines, understood a little about perspective and started to unravel the mysteries of colour. In other courses, I’ve begun to understand the intricacies of handling paint.

With these skills in place, the next step is to practice. Just like a writer needs to write to get better, an artist needs to draw and paint. If there is any innate quality in people that makes them able to write or paint, it might be the patience and stubbornness to do the work.

It is much easier to watch TV or scroll through the internet than to sit down and write or paint. Not everyone can make themselves use time productively.

I recently took a course on palette knife painting with the St. John’s artist Randy Blundon.

If regular brush painting classes are about control and accuracy, palette knife painting is about letting go.

In our workshop, we spent four hours learning the basics of moving paint with a knife and then put together two paintings.

For me the hardest part of this kind of painting is trusting that paint quickly thrown onto a canvas can result in beautiful images. When I paint with a brush, I’m careful that every line and colour is a step towards the image I have in my head.

With knife painting, the artist has a plan for the colour to be used but then pushes paint onto the canvas with little concern for details. It’s not easy for most of us to do but when we let go and allow the paint to run over the canvas, the results can be astounding.

Everyone taking the course came home with paintings that surprised us with their energy and beauty.

Perhaps we can try writing in a way that is analogous to knife painting. If we have an idea for a story, we can put down the first words that come out of our mind. If we stop worrying about proper grammar or the rules we’ve heard about story construction, we might come up with interesting results.

Allowing ourselves to write freely can be helpful. The advantage we have when we write this way is that we can always edit. Going over a first draft and improving it is almost always useful.

If we free ourselves to write like a palette knife painter, we can either come up with a first draft that can be improved or maybe even produce something of fierce untainted beauty.